Water Communion

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Religious Education for children and youth begins after the service in person! Registration REQUIRED.

If you don’t have a chalice, but want to light one, check out our Making a Chalice at Home page.

Service is followed by Coffee Hour.

Children’s Story

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Sermon Text

This morning we mark the beginning of our regular church year. Most Unitarian Universalist congregations take some kind of break during the summer months; either knock off services altogether or make do with simpler, more casual, and informal services. So it is that for most of our Unitarian congregations the Sunday after Labor Day is kind of a “Resumption Sunday.”

Our Unitarian forebears—the ministers anyway—were enamored with the academic model that included time off during July and August for study and relaxation. That model has filtered down to today; roughly two-thirds of our UU churches and fellowships across the continent are having formal in-gathering services this morning.
Many—probably most—of them will include a water communion ceremony as we are going to do. However, this is a recent development. Were you to happen upon a Unitarian or Universalist worship services 150 years ago it would look a lot different. More “Christian” for one thing—or look and feel a lot more that way. Our spiritual ancestors were liberals, all right, but they coalesced around what they called “pure religion”: love your neighbor, help and be kind to the poor, work for justice—that sort of thing. They tended to understand and express their religious faith in the language and metaphors of the Bible.

Over time, all this has changed. Growing cultural pluralism, the theory of Evolution, widespread compulsory education—all these and more have contributed to a new, more secular way of seeing and understanding the world. A worldview that most of us—and most of our fellow-citizens—share.

Coming up with connecting symbols and stories for folks like us to coalesce around was what led a group of UU feminist activists led by hymnist Carolyn McDade to create the first water communion at a continental Women and Religion convocation in East Lansing, Michigan forty-one years ago. Carolyn McDade was the person who wrote “Spirit of Life” that we sing here often. Writing about it later, Carolyn wrote,

“We were beginning to reach for new and inclusive symbols and rituals that speak to us of our togetherness to one another, to the totality of life and to our place on the planet. We moved in an intuitive response to the potential of water’s presence and deep meaning in all our lives.” [“Coming Home Like Rivers to the Sea,” Carolyn McDade and Lucile Shuck Longview” in Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experiences, ed. by Elizabeth Dodson Gray.]

No doubt our feminist UU forebears of forty years ago had been inspired by some of the same classical ideas expressed by poets over the ages, sharing the sounds of water’s run from the mountains to the sea; trickles becoming gurgles and babbles and then rushing streams becoming great meandering rivers all the way to the ocean. Like Carolyn McDade the poetry of legendary Chinese sage Lao Tzu repeatedly points out and celebrates water’s feminine aspect. “How like Tao is water, the profound and eternal female.

Similar imagery comes from the Enuma elish, a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian creation story that—like Lao Tzu—antedates the Bible. In the Enuma elish, all life is churned up and comes to birth out of the mingling of the sea and fresh waters where the Tigris and Euphrates empty into the Persian Gulf.

Creation legends, like the Enuma elish, are myths, i.e., picture imagery or poems. Poems about dynamics and energies that are happening all the time. In this case about how creativity happens: from the mixing of everyone’s energy into a common vision and common goals.

That is what genuinely creative communities are all about. And it’s what everyone I have met here over the last three years is hoping the coming year is all about at ESUC (East Shore Unitarian Church), as you think seriously about calling a full-time, settled minister.

There is something transformational—almost magical—about genuinely creative communities. How being part of them gives energy back to us even as we give of ourselves. Such communities are synergistic, a term made popular by the late neo-futuristic architect, sustainability advocate, and lifelong Unitarian R. Buckminster Fuller. A group is synergistic, Fuller held, when the whole is clearly and powerfully greater than the sum of its parts. Moreover, synergistic communities nurture and support nascent creativity within each member. It’s as though in joining hearts and forces we give one another wings to grow. And to be more creative, and collectively more culturally creative.
Let us pledge to be that way, and to encourage it among ourselves in the year ahead. And now let us now celebrate a here-and-now mythic re-mingling of energies among us in our own unique UU synergistic home.

In closing: We celebrate the gathering of these waters, as we celebrate this community, gathered in the spirit of free inquiry, kindly support, and meaningful service as we are begin our year together. Covid notwithstanding, may it be a wonderful year!
Amen.

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